Emails made easy

One part of my current work involves acting as an external examiner to a university and I frequently receive an email with 12 attachments, each attachment containing 10 or 15 pages of information. It can take two hours to peruse the information in the attachments and, even longer, if I have to read in detail all the information transmitted. As part of another area of my work, I'm sent emails with attachments of latest policy documents, which are often updates of previous policy documents, but there is no indication as to which bits have been updated. I'm left with the dilemma – do I print both versions and then read them side by side and try to spot the difference or do I save the document to a file and then ignore it? I spoke yesterday to a colleague of mine who returned to work after one week's annual leave. He had 600 emails waiting for him in his inbox. He said he had begun scanning them and deleting, but was in danger of deleting something important.